Gakked from melissajm

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

I do wonder what "most significant" means, and just how bored I must be to be doing this meme at all. Gakked from capnoblivious although I'm sure I've seen it around before.

Excuse me while I switch off the Gaugin play. There's only so much slurping I can take on the radio. Pointless sex is somehow more bearable on tv.

Below is Time's most significant SF novels between 1953-2006 (allegedly).

The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson*
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick*
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett*
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Trooper, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

You might note there are no strike-throughs. This has less to do with my inability to remember how those are done than with the fact that if I hate something within the first few pages, I no longer bother finishing it. Life's too short. I rarely give up on a book if I've laboured as far as halfway, although I recently did so with The Eyre Affair. There are no medals for forcing yourself through a book.

What's perhaps most puzzling to me is how many of these books are Fantasy. Does SF in the compiler's opinion stand for Speculative Fiction? Now that we've created this situation where there's confusion over what the simple initials SF stand for, even though for years and years they obviously stood for Science Fiction, maybe we need to revert to spelling everything out again. Sigh.

And if SF does stand for Speculative Fiction, where are the Horror books?

Interesting to see the writers who are on there twice. Alfred Bester's work, for example, I would not have rated so highly. I read The Demolished Man, thought it okay but not outstanding, and certainly wouldn't, on the basis of it, read anything more of his. Yet there he is, twice. Heinlein appears three times. Although I find his work readable, even the most rambling ones, I wouldn't call them significant. Nor do I think The Man in the High Castle is Dick's best work. Fan of his though I am, I found it a tad dull. I think A Scanner, Darkly is easily the best book of his I've read (and I've read most of them). And let's face it, Androids is the one everyone's heard of. Similarly, Le Guin's The Dispossessed far outshines The Left Hand of Darkness for quality of writing. Perhaps LHOD's significance lies in its having been, shall we say, somewhat controversial when it was published.

In a fit of something (boredom? self-hatred? ennui?) at two in the morning, I uninstalled Trillian, unsubscribed from all my newsgroups, got rid of those games I don't play any more, got rid of some of the games I play too much (RIP Nonosweeper) and even deleted the entire contents of my Boards folder (which I'm now trying frantically to recreate).

I really shouldn't stay up that late.

Anyway, here I am staring at Windows Update. Why do I do this to myself? Ah, I remember; it's the threats. Those thar internet threats, even more scary (because not restricted to the London Underground) than those thar terrorist threats. Sigh.

The laptop managed to download eleven out of twelve updates before the connection became a disconnection. Ah, that thar obsolete dial-up technology. How I love it. Not. Then, while I was installing the updates, I got asked if I wanted to install IE 7. Well, I don't use IE. I even do Windows Update in an IE tab in Firefox, that's how much I don't use IE. But those thar internet threats threaten that they can threaten your threatened laptop even when you're not running IE. So obviously the more recent version is a better bet (because those thar threatening people have had less chance to find and exploit all the flaws in it). I say yes, sure, go ahead, install it. And what a pretty graphic its download screen has. Pity it doesn't say anything about, yanno, how long the download is expected to take. Sigh.

Why am I so bored again?

Oh, yes. I gave up writing for a week.

*screams and climbs the walls*